I love sparc, and I love gentoo on it. But there are a lot of applications that are masked. So I was wondering if there is any way I can get to know why a application is masked on sparc (or a other architecture).
Most of the times if I know the reason it should be ok. Now that I don't know why it's kinda annoying. "Shall I compile it anyway, is it just not tested on sparc, or will it crash completely?"

Rhythmbox is the one this time. The ebuild has x86 and ppc as keywaords, but why not sparc? Just not tested?

I just unmask it and go for it. If it works, then hooray for me. If not, well, I guess that was why it was masked._________________Inspiron 4100 & Sun UltraAXe
Portage on Solaris|Dell Laptop Hacks
The way you feel about organized religion is the same way I feel about organized socialism.

You're mostly right. If something has been well tested, it gets the 'sparc' keyword. If something has been tested a bit, it gets '~sparc' for a while before it's moved to 'sparc'. If we know that an ebuild won't work, we'll mask it for sparc. Anything that hasn't been tested isn't keyworded at all, which portage treats as a mask.

So, if something is hard-masked, it means "it will almost certainly not compile, or if it does it will probably crash". If it's unkeyworded, it means we don't know.

Sidenote: So why don't we have as many packages keyworded as the x86 guys? Well, there are only maybe a dozen devs who have regular access to sparc kit (although the number is on the rise). We don't have in-depth knowledge of every single app in portage, so many things remain untested until we receive user reports. For example, I don't think any of us use emacs (vim baby!), so pretty much nothing in the app-emacs category has been keyworded. It doesn't mean that nothing in app-emacs will work -- chances are it will -- just that no-one has tested it enough to say.

If you don't know how to check why a package is masked, please consider adding an "I would like this feature" comment to this bug. I figure that if enough people say "I want this", Carpaski will find it quicker to implement the feature than to delete all the bugzilla emails

PS multiple window emacs works fine with the usual ultrasparc options....and I've been running emacs since before the days of Dos 3.3 and the arpanet, i.e. if emacs didn't work I'd be sure to mention it...often._________________Being a Gentoo user means living in a house inhabited by a family of crazed carpenters. When you wake up, the house is different. Maybe there is a new turret, or some walls have moved, or perhaps someone has removed the floor under your bed.

I just did that to see if it would actually emerge and patch the kernel. It does, but that is about it. If you look at the actual source on of the very first things it declares is the path to i386 sources. I'm hoping to get some free time to go through it soon._________________Gentoo systems.
X2 4200+@2.6 - Athy
X2 3600+ - Myth
UltraSparc5 440 - sparcy

[quote="NewBlackDak"]I just did that to see if it would actually emerge and patch the kernel./quote]

It will patch the kernel, because all arch are present in source, but it doesn't mean a thing. There is interest in sparc openmosix from several posters and probably a lot more lurkers. The openmosix group sounds like they only will work on 'big number boxes', but then they did Intel before AMD...._________________Being a Gentoo user means living in a house inhabited by a family of crazed carpenters. When you wake up, the house is different. Maybe there is a new turret, or some walls have moved, or perhaps someone has removed the floor under your bed.